CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.
FOREWORD
Just to refresh the memory of some of us who do not come fresh from work upon him, Epiphanius was born about 315 and died a.d. 403. He is thus an older contemporary of a famous pair, Jerome and Rufinus, both born in the neighborhood of 340, the latter dying in 410 while the former lived until 420. During their eastern residence both of these men became acquainted with the old fellow, and both at one period of their lives admired him, Jerome's admiration, as well as his life, outlasting that of Rufinus. Jerome, himself a linguist of parts, was particularly taken with Epiphanius' knowledge of five tongues: Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian, Greek, and Latin.
Epiphanius was born almost in the very middle of Palestine, perhaps of Jewish parentage or extraction. In his youth he spent a considerable time in Egypt, attracted by and presently drawn into narrowly orthodox, anti-Origenistic, monastic circles. The rest of his life he passed in spreading this type of orthodox monasticism and combating all heresies, tracing them all to Origen and Origenism. This brought him not indeed one of the great bishoprics, nor a patriarchate, but a position not without influence as bishop of Constantia (Salamis) in Cyprus, which chair he occupied for thirty-five years (367-402).
His quarrels and his writings show Epiphanius to have had a crabbed old single-track mind, and the track he covers is usually a sidetrack. He clearly knew too much for his limited understanding. His style is discursive; his thought is poorly organized. Good and bad information, important and unimportant matters, stand side by side and form a rather unsavory mess. Hence the study and editing of his works, a thorny subject at best, has attracted few students and lags behind that of his contemporaries. In the case of his Ἀγκυρωτός , a summary of what he considered the true faith, that does not matter so much, for it is little used at any time. His Panarion, a statement about eighty heresies and the remedies for them, is another matter. Here, after all, there is much information not to be found elsewhere. No work of similar bulk and compass on the same subject was produced by any medieval Christian. Its fame, indeed, exceeds its merit. |viii Yet, as is often the case in such encyclopedic works, it was the best for want of a better; and so it continued to be used and quoted, especially in the East, throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times. It should be properly edited and thoroughly studied.
The work with a few elements of which this Foreword deals is usually quoted, in whatever language (Greek, Latin, Syriac, etc.) it may be, as a book or essay on Weights and Measures. This title is clearly not the one which Epiphanius gave to it. We do not know what Epiphanius himself called it. From its contents it might be designated as a brief introduction to the Bible. Such general introductions, however, presently grew and multiplied; and in this case Epiphanius' work, not remaining alone in the field, proved clearly not to be the best.
The one feature of this particular work of Epiphanius which did remain unique in the Christian and scriptural field was the extensive statement on biblical weights, measures, and related subjects into which, with his usual discursiveness and lack of organizatory ability, the addleheaded old pedant permitted himself to be drawn. No one else covered this ground to anything like the same extent; and so on this matter Epiphanius remained once more the best, and as such is quoted throughout the Middle Ages, especially by Syriac writers. In editing Barhebraeus (a.d. 1226-72) and in studying the Karkaphensians and their philological statements, one constantly meets quotations from or references to Epiphanius. The anti-Origenic orientation of both major branches of the Syriac church, Nestorian and Monophysite (Jacobite), may have something to do with his popularity in those quarters. In any case, in order to trace the sources of Barhebraeus, Karkaphensian philology, and much else in Syriac literature, it proved necessary to recur time and again to Epiphanius' Weights and Measures.
Of this redoubtable work only fragments remain in Greek. The complete work was preserved in Syriac translation only. Of this Syriac translation there are more or less voluminous extracts in every manuscript of Karkaphensian textual studies. The whole work exists, so far as we know, in two manuscripts, both in the British Museum, one from the middle of the 7th, the other from the 9th century.
As we got under way in the Oriental Institute on the Peshitta or |ix Syriac Bible projects, it soon became evident that the Dindorf-Migne Greek material did not suffice for our needs. This had become manifest likewise to our last predecessor in a similar undertaking, the curious Paul de Lagarde of Gottingen. Lagarde had therefore undertaken an extensive study and a series of editions of this Epiphanius material. In his usual fashion he scattered this work around in a series of odd publications, many of them in small editions. These are not easy to get and, when obtained, generally not easy to use. The Syriac text, for example, he printed in Hebrew letters, because there was no Syriac type in Gottingen. His translation into German is curious. In various notes voicing his disgust and alleging (a thing Lagarde does not often admit) his incompetence, he shows that this was to him no labor of love. Jülicher's statement in Pauly-Wissowa that the text is "sehr schlecht ediert" by Lagarde is, indeed, too harsh a judgment. But a better, more easily accessible, more usable, and in every way more definitive edition than that of Lagarde, dated 1880, was clearly called for.
So we undertook a new edition, with a carefully annotated English translation. The work was given under my supervision to a younger doctor of our department, a diligent and careful southerner, James E. Dean. We soon found that editing any Epiphanius text was no joke, least of all in a Syriac translation for much of which the original Greek is missing. Piecing together the oddments of information and misinformation which he considers knowledge, sorting them, getting at the meaning of his sloppy style of expression, is often much like attempting to create order out of chaos; it demands heavenly patience and superhuman, perhaps superdivine, ingenuity.
Epiphanius' knowledge of Hebrew, or at least of the Hebrew Bible, was not all that Jerome's praise would lead us to believe. Among other things he quotes Ps. 141:1 (in § 6) in a barbarous Hebrew text form not otherwise known. This is clearly not a valuable variant in any sense, nor does he preserve thereby an otherwise unknown ancient text. It is manifest on the face of it that either he or some rabbi spoofing him, as a little later such men spoofed Mohammed, is rendering back into Hebrew perhaps a Greek or Latin translation or at any rate the general sense of the passage. If a Jewish rabbi committed the atrocity, he may have been trying to avoid defiling the ipsissima verba |x of the sacred text by keeping them out of the hands of the unbelieving goy and fooling him into accepting others. If Epiphanius himself made a mere show of his knowledge of Hebrew, it is unforgivable that he placed something of his own concoction in place of the original, which was easily obtainable and was well known to his pet adversary Origen before him and to his admiring friend Jerome in his own time. This is merely an example of Epiphanius' inaccuracy and sloppiness.
As touching at most points on Greek and Latin and therefore of more general interest, there may here be presented solutions, or attempted solutions, of lexicographical problems found not at all or not in full in lexicons, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, and, at least so far as I know, not taken up or not fully studied previously:
§ 20. "Diocletian @@ ( οὐαὶ τρανίσας ) ceased to reign." The curious Syriac transliteration belongs in the Syriac lexica, the fully Hellenized verb in the Greek lexica.
§ 21. Syriac: "craft of the oil press." The Greek, ἐλαιοτρίπτης (Breslau ms., ἐλαιοτρήπτης ), is not in Liddell and Scott, though Epiphanius is elsewhere quoted. Here he clearly attests the use of the word in Cyprus in the 4th century.
@@@, passive of ' akil, "to measure," is not merely "to be measured," "to be defined by measure"; it clearly means here "to be used as a measure" by such and such a people. This meaning is not found in any Syriac lexicon.
§ 24. Epiphanius expatiates on the mystery of the number 22: 22 works of God, 22 generations to Jacob, 22 books of the Bible to Esther, 22 letters of the alphabet, 22 xestai in the Hebrew and the Roman modius. In Hebrew a child learns to aleph, in Greek ἀλφεῖν ; the latter, known as from ἀλφάνω , 2d aor. inf., is here apparently used in a sense for which we would say "to learn one's ABC's." No lexicon, so far as I know, exhibits this crochet of Epiphanius' learning.
§ 43. In connection with xou~j (6 or 8 xestai, sextarii [cf. § 55], pints) the Syriac clearly furnishes by transliteration τριχοῦς . The word is labored over by Lagarde unsuccessfully. So far as I know no Greek lexicon has the combination. The transliteration belongs in the Syriac lexicon.
§ 46. The word litra is said to mean ἐμοί ἐστιν . The li , @@ , "to me," fits. For the tra we can find nothing that makes good sense, |xi though in § 54 Epiphanius dogmatically makes the statement that in Hebrew and/or Syriac it means "it is."
§ 54. In connection with litra, where it comes up the second time, Epiphanius mentions its Latin equivalent, libra, which, he says, by @@ means "equality." The pointing indicates a foreign, in this case almost certainly Greek, compound term. Seeking for Greek equivalents to the members of the compound, one could see fairly easily that tajjev, metajjev, "prepare," was some form of Greek e9toi=moj, that the ending -uth indicated a Greek abstract ending - ia , perhaps ἑτοιμασία , and that melltha = word = λόγος . The abstract ending, in Semitic necessarily placed in the first member of the genitival combination, might, indeed probably would, in Greek be found at the end of the compound. Trying this out, we arrive at etoimologia . Since the itacistic equation oi > u fits exactly the time demanded for this Syriac, we arrive at ἐτυμολογία as the original Greek, and this fits perfectly into the context. Up to a short time ago I thought that I had been the first to see this; and, as far as our form and context are concerned, this remains true. Then I happened upon a note by the fine old Syriac scholar G. Hoffmann of Kiel. In this note he takes up the vain labors of E. Nestle and Nöldeke over the similar, but clearly more Syriacized, term tujdva dmelltha used by the highly learned Jacob of Elessa. For tujava Nestle had arrived only at κατασκευή, with which of course he could do nothing; and Noldeke had suggested that it stood for a Greek technical term, but had not supplied it. Hoffmann tersely states: "@@ = ἕτοιμον = ἔτυμον . @@ @@ = ἑτοιμολογία = ἐτυμολογία , denn oi = u ." Our work therefore supplies only the first known occurrence of this combination, its older form (later Syriacized further by Jacob), and the greater precision attained by Sturtevant for the equation oi = u.
Syriac usage for "etymology" is interesting. The study of Greek |xii was continued seriously and intensively in the Syriac world of scholarship to the 8th or 9th century (by translators for the Arabs), and a smattering of it remained to the 13th century (Barhebraeus). So we find the grammarians Severus bar Shakko, Elias of Sobha, and Barhebraeus (8th/9th-13th century) using @@ and derivatives in this simple transliteration. The translators of Aristotle, and following them the lexicographers Bar Ali and Bar Bahlul (10th-11th century), transliterate @@, perhaps with the rough breathing of ἑτοιμολογία , but possibly simply equating @ ( h ) with e since the two letters are related in origin. Finally, perhaps following the lead of the Arabs, the late Ebedjesu uses a proper translation, @@ ( = deductio, derivatio).
§ 59. σαταῖον , κορεῖον , and perhaps καβεῖον (or καβιεῖον ) are attested by Syriac transliterations. They are measures of the ground areas which can be sown by a sa&ton or seah, a kor, and a cab respectively of grain. These forms in these meanings do not seem to occur in any Greek or Syriac lexicon.
§ 82. @@ is an astronomical term, but not = ἀστρονομία . A compound like ἐτυμολογία above is indicated, @@ = τίθημι ; @@ (or @@) = θέσις , better - θεσία . The term ἀστρθεσία , "placing or configuration of stars," fits the context perfectly. The constellations Pleiades and Orion as mentioned in Job 9:9 (at least as Epiphanius reads it) are the "configurations of stars" to which the reference applies.
It remains to express our appreciation of the kindness of the British Museum in making available to the Oriental Institute photostatic copies of both its Syriac manuscripts concerned, the older of which we here reproduce in facsimile. Our reproductions are two-thirds of actual size. Where the signs were too faint in the photostats they have been strengthened by Dr. Anis Kh. Frayha.
M ARTIN S PRENGLING
T HE U NIVERSITY OF C HICAGO